It was late October, and the first frost had come and gone through beautiful Sovereign City.  An Indian summer had slipped in after it and taken up in its old house, and the neighbours all agreed that this was a significant improvement.  It was warm again, temperate, and the city enjoyed a solid week of perfect weather.  The sun shone bright and full and pleasant day after day, like a bloated canary on its perch, singing endlessly to the wonder of the universe.

That day was no different.  It was sixty-five degrees, and everything was still green and lovely.  The wind hinted at winter when it blew through back alleys and across suburban yards littered with cheap plastic toys, but the chill was pesky at best, and no one cared for its efforts.  Late afternoon tugged the sun closer and closer to the horizon, and the city was all soft golds and reds. In front of the Morris Carpenter Public Library, things were more red than gold, but that had very little to do with the sun or the weather, and much more to do with the fact that the street directly in front of the library had a grotesque smear of blood down the right-hand side. There was a big public bus stopped there, with its nose hovering over the end of the smear and its tail-end jutting out into the lane of oncoming traffic.

Sirens wailed over the chirping of birds that should have been considering heading down south with a little more urgency.  The weather had them fooled.  Police cars were parked at odd angles to the bus with their blue and red lights flashing, and an ambulance had nudged its way in as well, its back-end doors flung open as far as they could be flung.  People milled about on the sidewalk and the library steps and in the street, crowded around rickety wooden barriers with deep cracks and chipped paint.  “POLICE LINE,” they said, “DO NOT CROSS,” and they looked like hurdles.  People whispered and jostled and took pictures with their phones as the EMTs loaded a stretcher into the gaping mouth of the ambulance.  On the stretcher was something small and crumpled and red as the mess on the street.  It was a boy.  He was dying.

A pack of teenagers stood next to one of the patrol cars as an officer fed them questions and tried to act gentle.  They were pale and shaking, and one boy with dark hair simply stared at the front of the bus and looked like he was going to vomit.  The officer offered them hot coffee and thin wool blankets, but it was still sixty-five degrees, still green and lovely and golden, and they said no.  

“It’s so nice out,” said the boy with dark hair, staring.  “It’s so nice out.”

*

She was short and slim with wide hips and dark skin.  Her hair was worked into thick dreadlocks, and her lips were worked into a vaguely irritated pout.  She had been suspicious when she’d heard a terrible clatter across the tin roof of the hangar, but she hadn’t thought it in need of checking out until a loud crash resounded from the side of the building.  She’d run out to find him head-first in a pile of rusted scrap metal, only his unlaced kicks visible.

“Davey, what’re you doing?” she asked.

“Uh,” said the pile of scrap metal.  “Hide and seek?  You’re it.”

She rolled her eyes, and a tiny avalanche of jagged-edged scrap tumbled down the heap and clinked against the hard ground as those red kicks wiggled back and forth vigourously.  More junk was dislodged, but only enough to expose a bit of sickly gray ankle and the frayed edges of dirty jeans.  The wiggling stopped.

“And you found me!  Good job.  Now help me out,” Davey said.

“What, don’t you like it in there?  It looks nice and cozy, I think it’d suit you,” Sam teased, but she was already pushing chunks of metal away from the bit of Davey she could see.  She had to wonder if he’d gotten into stupid situations this frequently when he was alive.  It seemed like he was falling off a roof or lighting his arm on fire or something similar every time she turned around.  

It didn’t take long to clear away enough of the junk that Davey could push himself out, and when he did, the pile wasn’t so much a pile as it was a small lake of abandoned bits and pieces.  He brushed at the rust on his shirt and his jeans, and Sam frowned at him.  He’d managed to earn himself a long, crooked cut down his cheek, and she reached up and grabbed his chin to get a better look at it.  There was no blood, of course, and it’s not as though it would get infected, but she felt it needed to be stitched up.  It wouldn’t heal, and she figured he probably didn’t want it getting a whole lot bigger, though it was often difficult to tell with Davey.

“What’re you doing?” he asked.  “I mean, my face is real nice, I know, but you gotta ask before you just go grabbin’ it like that.  Also, it’s five bucks for this kind of quality close-up.”

“Oh, uh-huh.  What a shame I spent my last five dollars buying up those autographed pictures of you on eBay!”  She let go.  “Come on, loser, you sliced your face open.  Let’s go in and I’ll fix it up.  What were you doing on the roof, anyway?”

The sun was a big, bright orange where it sat on the horizon.  The air was warm and dry and generally pleasant, but there was no perfect green grass underfoot as they made their way back into the hangar.  There were only rocks and dirt and the occasional patch of shriveled, dead weeds that crinkled audibly as they were trod over, and Sovereign City was not beautiful.  Sovereign City was never beautiful if you were looking at it right.